Poems by Alpha

Musrara Mix 2025 Opening Show in collaboration with Goethe-Institut Israel 

In his first appearance in Israel since 2015, electronic musician Gelbart presents music for string quartet and speech synthesizer. The work revolves around the voice of a computer programmed by Gelbart. Long before the rise of chat GPT, the computer Alpha was programmed to write poems and sing them. Its voice does not purport to imitate a human voice, but rather to underscore the strangeness of the computer as an independent entity. The music, on the other hand, sets out to bridge the gap between the robotic and the human and mediate the cold expression through rich and organic harmonies of string instruments and a synthesizer. The piece was composed by Gelbart based on texts written by the computer Alpha and drew inspiration from diverse sources, including French Impressionism, Minimalism, early Modernist composers (Bartok, Ligeti), and ancient music.

Gelbart is a self-taught multi-instrumentalist, composer, filmmaker, and author. A dive into his body of work uncovers a bizarre yet wholly consistent world – an absurdist mirror-universe of sound and imagery that fuses the high-brow with the low, and the accessible with the complex. His concerts are a one-man tour de force – a DIY extravaganza that blends eccentric electropop with surreal visuals, seamlessly synchronized to create an immersive, multidimensional experience. He combines synthesizers with guitar, bass clarinet, vocoder, and a self-built blipping machine, often juggling them all at once. Gelbart’s lifelong devotion to innovation has so far resulted in more than 20 LPs and EPs (on Joyful Noise, Gagarin Records, and Lo Recordings among others), compositions for live ensembles, numerous award-winning animation films, and a sci-fi novel.

Gelbart’s music has been a fixture on WFMU, while his animations graced festivals from London to Japan, and his sci-fi film Vermin was screened at the US Library of Congress. In recent years, Gelbart composed a large-scale, 70-minute work commissioned for a live ensemble at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (set for release as a double LP in late 2025), as well as a long-form piece for string quartet and electronic voice, performed in both Casa del Lago, Mexico and Berghain. Gelbart’s upcoming solo LP, Liquids and Flesh, will be released on Egglike Records in April 2025.